Arsenal and Shkodran Mustafi: There is no price

As Monaco come calling, Arsenal have reportedly set their price for Shkodran Mustafi at £27 million. In reality, they should be looking to sell, no matter the fee.

Shkodran Mustafi is entering his fourth season as an Arsenal player. He is now 27 years of age, is in his peak years, and should be at the top of his game. Instead, he is being booed — wrongly, I should state — by his own fans when being subbed on a pre-season friendly.

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Now, while the boos are unacceptable and utterly unjustified from a purely supporting perspective, they do reveal the state of Mustafi’s impact on the team at this present time: he is a clear and significant detriment to what is already a hapless and hopeless defence.

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Throughout his time in north London, Mustafi displayed the ideal qualities that the modern centre-half must possess. He is quick across the ground, strong in the air, committed to his challenges, and willing to stride out of defence and instigate attacks. Because of his seemingly ideal skill set, there was a hope that he could develop into a serviceable defender if he was able to figure it all out between the ears.

However, three years later, now in the prime of his career, and under the tutelage of two different coaches, Mustafi is making more positional, mental, gung-ho and rash errors than ever before. He has looked at his absolute worst in pre-season, including when misguidedly attempting to play a stupid offside against Moussa Dembele for Lyon’s second goal at the weekend. If Mustafi was to figure it all out, he would have done so by now.

All this leads me to say that Arsenal should be doing everything they can to offload the German. This is not the case of selling one of your star players and attempting to squeeze every penny out of their brilliance because you do not want to lose them on the cheap; Mustafi is a problem, and to solve it, you have to make sacrifices.

In this case, the sacrifice is price. Because Arsene Wenger and the club maddeningly and utterly foolishly bought Mustafi for £35 million, the second-highest fee the club had paid for any player at the time and was the most expensive centre-half in the Premier League not bought by Manchester City or United, the fifth-most expensive, they are now desperately trying to recoup as much value as possible, reportedly asking for an absurd £27 million, but such demands are warding away potential buyers, and thus a sale which is increasingly necessary.

In reality, there should be no price too low for Mustafi. Even if a team was to offer Arsenal £5 million, they should take it, simply to get him and his £90,000-a-week wages out of the club, allowing the likes of Calum Chambers, Rob Holding and Dinos Mavropanos to show if they are capable of filling the starting role.

Arsenal must do the leg work to sell Mustafi, not the other way round. And with that being the case, they cannot be so haughty and naive with their price demands.